I was happily surprised to hear this afternoon that Daniel Penny has been acquitted of charges related to the death of Jordan Neely, the homeless madman whom Penny bravely subdued as Neely was menacing riders on the F train in New York last year.
It is a sign of our degraded times that Penny was charged at all, rather than hailed as the hero he was. I hope he can put his life back together after this.
I must say that I’m sorry also for poor Jordan Neely, who was clearly mentally ill, and should never have been on that train in the first place. We really don’t seem to do much of anything right at all these days.
Alas, we should not be surprised if this isn’t the end at all for Mr. Penny. A case like this is the perfect “lawyer’s ramp”, and I’m sure swarms of them are already circling around Mr. Neely’s family looking to spin up a civil suit.
3 Comments
I hope Daniel Penny takes a lot of money from the New York City government, the District Attorney’s Office and especially the District Attorney herself in civil lawsuits because it would serve them Justice for what they wrongly did to him. I agree wi the you about Daniel Penny, Jordan Neely and the state of affairs today. God bless!
At some point in the 1970’s, during the first great wave of manufactured cultural relativism that swept through our society, our betters decided it was more humane to allow the severely mentally ill to wallow in their own filth on the streets, where the insane could terrorize the average citizen on a daily basis, for years on end.
It’s amazing to look at photos of NYC in the 1950’s and early 60’s, and see how relatively clean and orderly everything was. Friends that are native New Yorkers, and old enough to remember the early 60’s, recall an amazing New York that had public restrooms available at every subway station.
Then all hell broke loose in the late 60’s, and all of a sudden, you didn’t dare go in the restrooms in the subway, and by the early 70’s, all public restrooms were shuttered.
I moved to NYC in 1988, and the homeless issue was out of control even then.
Giuliani cleaned it up to a large degree, but subsequent administrations let everything unwind again.
Now every major city in the U.S. is dealing with this issue, and everyone pretends they don’t know what to do, while multiple Democratic administrations in every major city squeeze billions out of taxpayers pretending to address an issue they have no intention of solving.
Remember… there was a time, before the 60’s, when the mentally ill were kept away from the general population to everyone’s benefit.
I realize there were abuses in some of the institutional settings, but the answer was not to just flush the insane directly onto the streets.
Our betters don’t actually want to fix any of the problems that plague our major cities.
Another Dave: Very well put. Never let a crisis go to waste, and if there isn’t a crisis, then create one.
I propose that we avoid using the word “homeless.” This is a Leftist term that obfuscates the real issue.